Queen of Disaster
by wouldtheywriteasongforyou
Summary: All Horcruxes do is bring people pain. / a soulmate!au using lock-and-key necklaces


**Author's Note:  
>Disclaimer: "Queen of Disaster" is by Lana del Rey.<strong>

soulmate!au. Written for the Ship Competition KBOW v. Ronks ; prompts _"lawyer, octopus, blood, icon_, _letterbox_, _arthritis_, and _serendipitous_" ; QLFC finals prompts "It must unscrew this way...no, that way"

9 November 2014. Word Count: 1,678

**It's not like Wood would miss her, anyway.**

* * *

><p><strong><span>Queen of Disaster<span>**

[-]

She's four, so very young and impressionable, when she first asks about the necklace dangling around her neck. It's silver and so smooth and shiny; Katie can't help but run her fingers over the cool piece of metal every few seconds.

"That's your Horcrux, Katie. Your soulmate necklace," her mother explains. "Everyone has half of a pair. Only one person will have the key that can unlock the heart. That's how we know who we're supposed to be with."

Katie passes her thumb over the heart icon. It's reassuring, this physical piece of her soul. She wonders if her soulmate is happy and thinking of her, too.

"You mustn't go looking for your soulmate. Bad things happen to those who try to interfere with fate," her mother warns. "Promise me you won't."

"Pinky-promise," Katie says and crosses pinkies with her mother.

x

Katie likes the serendipitous idea of soulmates and that someone out there in this big, wide world is her other half. It sounds so terribly romantic in the best way possible. Old Mr and Mrs Longbottom, who live down the street and share necklaces, are pushing seventy and yet their love is as strong as ever even though most days they can't remember the other's name. Katie wants a love as pure as theirs, and she longs to know whom the person is that her soul recognises unconditionally even when her mind is unable to.

At the same time, though, what if she never finds her soulmate? There are seven billion souls wandering about this world; the odds are stacked against her finding her soulmate in this lifetime.

"Don't worry," Katie's mother says when she notices Katie nervously grabbing onto her heart necklace more often than not. "Be patient. It will all work out in the end."

Katie isn't very patient at all but she has to distract herself soon or else the temptation of searching for her soulmate will become unavoidable. For the first time, she notices that her mother wears two Horcruxes around her neck.

"Mum? Do you have _two_ souls?" the nine-year-old asks with wide eyes.

Katie's mother absent-mindedly reaches up to play with the heart-and-key decorating her collarbone. "No, sweetheart," she says softly and shows Katie the key. "This one was your father's." After Katie matches up the heart and the key – they're a perfect fit but the heart won't open because it's broken beyond repair – Katie's mother excuses herself and retreats to the master bedroom.

Katie starts to wonder if Horcruxes are a good thing. All the necklaces seem to do is bring people pain.

x

When she's eleven, there's a curious letter in the letterbox inviting her to attend a curious school where curious people like herself learn quite curious things. Soon, she's whisked far, far away to a castle called Hogwarts, and with a swish-and-flick of her wand Katie is submerged into a world where impossible things are suddenly possible.

One windy day in October, the Gryffindor girls sit outside to study. It's not their brightest idea, what with their study notes flying about haphazardly, but then again it's the first official day of Quidditch try-outs and boys are starting to be a thing.

A very big thing, if one goes by the way the First Year girls are madly whispering about.

Katie is not interested in the dirty, smelly, snotty imbeciles who are only one or two steps up from being primates – just last Tuesday, the Weasley twins had Saran-wrapped all of the first-floor toilet seats – but out of the other five Gryffindors sitting outside with her, only Angelina Johnson shares her sentiments.

"Oh, would you just _look_ at his broad shoulders!" Scarlett gushes.

"And those eyes," Brea swoons.

"I want to marry him," Madeleine proclaims. All three sigh at the very thought.

Alicia and Angelina roll their eyes at their friends' antics, and Katie asks them in an unintentionally much-too-loud voice: "Who are they even talking about?"

They all gasp. Brea looks ready to faint.

"You can't be serious," Madeleine says, eyes round with disbelief.

Katie is. But boys aren't important to her; getting good marks in all her classes is a higher priority. "Never mind," she says and uses a Sticking Charm to bind the left margin of all her History of Magic papers together. "Nicolas Flamel is the only bloke I care for right now. Alicia, have you read the part in his autobiography about his alchemic success in creating the Philosopher's Stone?"

"Oliver Wood," Scarlett interjects primly, "is so much more interesting than this stuffy old bloke who never dies."

Katie's brow is furrowed as she tries to decipher Scarlett's segue. "Oliver...?" It's when her teeth scrape against her bottom lip as she says the final syllable does she make the connection to the Quidditch player her three friends had been discussing about earlier. "Oh! Oliver Wood."

x

His name must be infectious or something because ever since Scarlett spoke those four magical syllables, Katie catches herself repeating his name – both under her breath and in her mind – at the oddest of times.

_Oliver Wood_.

She wants to go find this boy and tell him to get out of her mind.

x

Before she goes to bed one night, Katie hears a heartbeat and a more muted echo of the same rhythm. The pulses have a distinct pattern: _Long-short-short_. _Long-short-short_.

Like clockwork, her mind reverts back to thinking about _Oliver_.

And the second heartbeat, the one she discovers to be coming from her Horcrux, silences itself.

x

As a Second Year at Hogwarts, on the first day of scheduled classes, Katie cannot wait for History of Magic. Sure, she agrees with the majority – oh, all right, _all_ of the student body – that Professor Binns is a complete and utter bore, but History is Katie's thing. Timelines and dates and immersing herself in the past all come naturally to her. And since she showed such an aptitude for the subject last year, Headmaster Dumbledore is allowing her to skip a few years so that she can take the O.W.L. History of Magic course as a Second Year.

Katie enters the History classroom and takes a deep breath of the familiar smell of old, well-worn books. She takes a seat in one of the old desks, whose legs sound as arthritis-ridden and creaky as a person who is past their prime, and opens her textbook to the page she had left off during the reading she had done on the train ride to Hogwarts.

Class is well underway when the door bangs open. A Fifth Year boy with messy brown hair struts into the classroom. The light catches on his hair and on the necklace chain hanging around his neck. Katie can't help but notice that his Horcrux is silver and so smooth and shiny, though she can't see the charm on the necklace, for he has it tucked under his rumpled shirt.

"Sorry, Professor," he says in a not-very-sorry voice. "I got caught up with Quidditch things."

Professor Binns hasn't even noticed the arrival of this Quidditch-playing boy. He drones on and on in his boring monotone.

"Hey," the boy says as he saunters over to the empty desk near Katie. He turns the chair around and straddles it as he plops down in that careless typical boy pose. He flashes Katie an expression that is equal parts a smile and equal parts a smirk. "Mind letting me borrow your notes after class?"

He's obviously nothing but trouble, but hell, her twelve-year-old heart is in love. He's everything that she's not. He –

Katie blinks. She doesn't even know his name. With a quick glance over to his desk surface – he doesn't have a sheet of parchment out, and he definitely doesn't have his name written at the top of said parchment– she finds that her attempt to find information about him is futile.

"Bugger off, mate," she says instead.

He shrugs and saunters out of the classroom fifteen minutes later when Professor McGonagall asks to see Wood for a moment. (It's something to do with Quidditch, of course.)

x

He calls her a new name every day in History. Wood never shows up on time for attendance, and so he still doesn't know Katie's name.

Today, she is Catalina. He always asks for her notes but never for her name.

Surprisingly, it doesn't bother her as much as it should have.

x

"Try out for Quidditch," he tells her one day as they walk to the Great Hall together for the noon meal.

This is new. Oliver Wood has never walked with her anywhere before.

"Come on, Pascale," he encourages her with a bright smile on his face. "I bet you're an awesome flier."

"You bet wrong," Katie rolls her eyes. "Because I bet you forgot to factor in that I'm afraid of heights."

His jaw drops a kilometre before he recovers. "Rubbish," he says lightly but doesn't push the subject. She loves him a little more for that. "Just come to try-outs, anyway. See what you're missing out on."

x

In the end, she does not go to try-outs. Not that year or the year after or even the year after that.

She wants to be a lawyer for Wizengamot when she grows up. To achieve that, she has to study**study**_study_ the history of wizarding court cases and their rulings. That's why Katie is in the library instead of in the stands and cheering on her favourite Quidditch player.

It's not like Wood would miss her, anyway. She saw him sitting with Cho Chang by the lake all last spring. He was playing with tendrils of her hair as if they were octopus arms and with her silver, so smooth and shiny Horcrux heart. And Katie saw when he fit his silver key into Cho's beautiful heart and unlocked it for the whole world to admire.

Katie wonders if her necklace is cursed. Wasn't the whole point of soulmates that only one person in the world was destined to be yours? She grabs her Horcrux and yanks on the necklaces clasp. "It must unscrew this way...no, that way," she thinks aloud. Eventually, the chain breaks.

All Horcruxes do is bring people pain.

[-]


End file.
